Journalctl compiled without pattern matching support, pcre2 is not in main

[Bas Zoetekouw]

Please add pattern matching support to journalctl. At the moment, the -g (--grep) option as described in the man page doesn't work:

╰─▶ journalctl --grep=xhci-hcd
Compiled without pattern matching support

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

pcre2 library is not in Ubuntu Main, and therefore cannot be used, at runtime, by such a core package as systemd.

once pcre2 is available in main, and thus has full Ubuntu Security support, I will be able to enable pattern matching support.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michał J. Gajda (mgajda)]

Maybe we can have `journalctl-grep` package for administrators that use this grep functionality for checking what happened? Nowadays debugging is recognized as foremost computing activity, even chips have special JTAG pins to allow online debugging.

I could expect most of the system administrators with big logs would appreciate faster searching of log files thanks to `journalctl -g` in the leading cloud operating system.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

pcre2 was promoted to main today for Ubuntu 19.04.

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

journactl --grep works in Ubuntu 19.10 (but not 19.04 or older versions).